March 12, 2011

By MARIKO SANCHANTA and CHESTER DAWSON in Tokyo and DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan

WSJ’s Daisuke Wakabayashi reports from Northern Japan, where the extent of the devastation from a 8.9-magnitude earthquake and subsequent Tsunami became even clearer with the arrival of daylight Saturday morning.

TOKYO—The most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan triggered a 30-foot tsunami that washed away parts of the northern shore, leaving hundreds dead, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate their homes and raising fears of a radioactive release from some of the country’s many nuclear power plants.
Strong Quake Strikes Japan

The quake was one of the world’s five strongest in more than a century of record-keeping, with a magnitude of 8.9. It inflicted particularly severe damage in Japan’s northeast, where powerful waves swallowed warehouses and fishing boats and swept across neighborhoods and rice paddies. A train was reported derailed and missing. A quake-sparked blaze at an oil-storage site spread throughout a town of 75,000.

Japan’s National Police Agency said Saturday morning that 236 people had died, 725 were missing and 1028 injured. That toll is likely to rise as figures were compiled across the country: Police said 200 to 300 bodies had been found in the city of Sendai, the closest major city to the quake’s epicenter.

Worries mounted early Saturday over safety at two nuclear-power plants north of Tokyo, after power outages disabled the systems that cool fuel rods. Radiation levels in a control room of one reactor reached around 1,000 times the normal level early Saturday, Kyodo News reported the government’s nuclear agency as saying. Officials said they had asked people living within about six miles of that plant to evacuate. Some 20,000 people had left the area around that and another troubled plant by Saturday morning, Kyodo reported.
Japan Quake’s Effects

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See a map of post-earthquake events in Japan, Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast.

The impact of the quake’s first jolt, which hit at 2:46 p.m. on a clear Friday afternoon, was felt around the country, including in Tokyo. There, office buildings swayed. Trains, buses and phone service stopped. Millions of households lost power.

Japanese spent the rest of the day and night watching televised images of fires, collapsed buildings and deadly debris-filled waves, delivered by news anchors in hard hats. Dozens of powerful aftershocks emanated from off the eastern coast through Saturday morning, shaking the country and its people.

The quake’s footprint spread at about 3 a.m. local time, as new seismic activity rippled through the center to the country’s western coast, raising the specter of a series of quakes extending throughout the country, which sits atop crisscrossing fault lines on the so-called Pacific Rim of Fire.

“I really thought I was going to die,” Yuhei Sakaibara, a reporter for the local Sendai newspaper, said in a telephone interview Friday night. “Dishes went flying in every direction and huge cracks ripped up the walls. When I got outside, I saw that several houses in the neighborhood had collapsed.”

In a town of about 12,500 residents in neighboring Fukushima prefecture—at the outskirts of the worst-damaged areas—roads were cracked. Goro Okawara, a 68-year-old farmer who said he was in the fields when the first quake hit, said he thought the temblor would last 30 seconds but “it just kept going and kept getting worse and worse.”

The traditional kawara tiles on Mr. Okawara’s roof “came flying off,” he said, crumbling and spraying red clay blocks in all directions. A glass door shattered. A crater appeared in his driveway. Nearby, he said, the crematorium where his family was planning a funeral for a relative Saturday had collapsed. At the local cemetery, many headstones were snapped in half.

In all, about 100,000 residents of Fukushima province had evacuated by early Saturday, Kyodo reported.
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The quakes and waves slammed a nation that has had its prolonged share of miseries. An extended economic decline saw Japan recently slip behind China as the world’s second-largest economy. A series of scandals have not only discredited and paralyzed its political leadership, but also tarred institutions from elite universities to the ancient sumo sport.

Japan’s long-deadlocked parliament appeared initially to have set aside political bickering and rallied around calls for unity and new measures to keep the quake from further weakening the economy.

With damages estimates likely to mount quickly, news of the quake—which struck near the close of trading Friday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange—may pummel Japanese shares next week. Should the already debt-burdened government be forced to issues trillions of yen in reconstruction bonds, the move would affect the Japanese fixed-income market and weigh on Japan’s already-weakened credit rating from the world’s major rating agencies.

Yumiko Ono reports from Tokyo that more than 1000 people are dead or missing after a massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake and devastating tsunami struck Northern Japan Friday.
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Some economists have argued that a quake could actually lift the economy in the long run, by requiring a surge in rebuilding spending. But more immediately, the impact disrupted a spectrum of the nation’s industries, from auto and consumer-electronics makers to steel and beverage producers, forcing a number of them to shut factories.

Offers of sympathy were swift from around the world, with Japan’s foreign ministry saying it had recieved assistance offers from some 50 governments. These included China and Russia, which have recently had testy territorial disputes with Tokyo.

Premier Wen Jiabao expressed “deep sympathy and solicitude to the Japanese government and the people” and told Prime Minister Naoto Kan that China is willing to offer aid. An earthquake has been an occasion for China and Japan to set aside their differences before: After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed at least 68,000 people, Japan’s Self Defense Forces were the first foreign aid and rescue team allowed into China.

“Today’s events remind us of just how fragile life can be,” U.S. President Barack Obama said at a news conference. “Our hearts go out to our friends in Japan and across the region and we’re going to stand with them as they recover and rebuild from this tragedy.”
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Colliding plates under earth’s surface make Asia Pacific one of the most tectonically active region on earth.
Your Tsunami Photos

Were you there when the earthquake hit Japan, or were you among those evacuated along Pacific coasts? Email us your photos of the damage, at yourphotos@wsj.com.

Mr. Obama said he spoke Friday morning with Mr. Kan and offered whatever assistance was needed, and said he expected U.S. aid to be focused on helping with the cleanup. He said the U.S. has an aircraft carrier in Japan now, with another is on the way. A third ship is en route to the Marianas Islands to assist as needed, he said. The U.S. has a large military presence in Japan, and there were signs troops were being mobilized quickly there to help out.

Friday’s quake was the largest ever to hit the earthquake-prone country in terms of strength, but didn’t appear, at least in the early hours, to be as devastating as two great quakes of the 20th century. More than 100,000 people died or went missing in the 7.9-magnitude Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. The 1995 Kobe earthquake, which registered 7.3, killed more than 6,000 people in the region.
Disastrous Japan Earthquakes

A photographer looked over wreckage as smoke rose in the background from burning oil storage tanks at Valdez, Alaska, March 29, 1964.

One reason for the lower death toll appeared to be a heightened readiness in Japan, raised particularly after the Kobe quake embarrassed the government and builders for weak preparedness.

“Japan has spent a huge effort preparing for a destructive earthquake off the east coast and is better prepared than most countries in the world,” said Kevin McCue, a director at Australian Seismological Centre.

Analysts say steps taken since the wake-up call of the Kobe quake include using improved construction methods for bridges to make them more responsive to the shock and giving the country’s self-defense forces authority to more immediately engage in relief efforts.

Citizens also got some advance warning from the world’s first early-warning system, developed by the country’s meteorological agency. The agency detected the initial quake’s shock wave near the seismic center and sent off the warning message, which appeared on national television and radio as well as on mobile-phone screens. Throughout the day, the tell-tale warning chime sounded regularly before new tremors hit.

After the quake hit, the government ordered the nation’s military, police and emergency rescue personnel to head for the affected areas to help with the rescue missions.

The central bank quickly announced that it has set up a disaster-management team, headed by Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa, and said it was standing ready to supply liquidity to ensure stability in financial markets.

The government will likely first use roughly 200 billion yen ($2.41 billion) in emergency funding left in the budget for the current fiscal year ending this month, several Finance Ministry officials said. They said the proposed budget for the new fiscal year contains another 350 billion yen for natural disasters and 810 billion yen in emergency funding.

Across Japan, ports, railways and airports shut down. Car-navigation systems indicated that almost every entry point in Tokyo to the nation’s highway system was closed.

In Tokyo, cellphone reception was down, causing long lines to snake around pay phones. Children walked home from school, some with protective head gear. People huddled around televisions, trying to grasp the extent of the damage.

Near Tokyo Station, people streamed onto the street, where the only option was to walk— buses and taxis weren’t available and all trains were halted.

Akira Nomiya, 74, in Tokyo from Sapporo to visit his grandchildren, said the quake hit right after he stepped out of a monorail. “It shook so badly that I couldn’t keep standing as I stepped out of the monorail. People were just hanging onto the wall or sitting down on the ground. Girls were screaming on the platform.”

At 3:24 p.m., the first large aftershock could be felt by those standing outside of buildings in central Tokyo. Looking up at construction cranes shaking violently atop half-completed buildings, people gasped. As of early Saturday, at least 50 aftershocks were recorded.

The Japanese auto industry was also hit by the earthquake, with Nissan Motor Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. among those shutting plants, but one automotive analyst called the expected impact on the industry “manageable.”

Toyota shut down two assembly plants. At Honda’s plant in Tochigi, north of Tokyo, a factory ceiling collapsed, crushing a worker to death and injuring 30 others. Nissan said five plants were shut down immediately after the quake struck, with small fires extinguished at two of them. It was assessing its operations and those of suppliers to see whether production could restart Monday.

Analysts from the main ratings agencies—which have recently downgraded Japan’s sovereign debt—said it was too early to say how the quake might affect the country’s credit ratings. Richard Jerram, a Singapore-based economist at Macquarie Securities with long experience in Japan, said that while the scale of damage was hard to predict, “the most obvious concern is the debt market. That’s going to be the thing to watch.”

Japan’s political logjam won’t likely be a problem, as “you’re obviously going to get a cooperative approach,” he said.
—Juro Osawa, Kana Inagaki, Yoshio Takahashi, Mari Iwata
and Kenneth Maxwell contributed to this article.
[JQUAKE]
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“ This is truly a horrible tragedy. I feel very sorry for those affected as well as their family members. I hope they can get back on their feet quickly.

http://www.economist.com/content/chinese_equivalents
China is now the world’s second-biggest economy, but some of its provinces by themselves would rank fairly high in the global league. Our map shows the nearest equivalent country. For example, Guangdong’s GDP (at market exchange rates) is almost as big as Indonesia’s; the output of both Jiangsu and Shandong exceeds Switzerland’s. Some provinces may exaggerate their output: the sum of their reported GDPs is 10% higher than the national total. But over time the latter has consistently been revised up, suggesting that any overstatement is modest.

What about other economic yardsticks? Guangdong exports as much as South Korea, Jiangsu as much as Taiwan. Shanghai’s GDP per person is as high as Saudi Arabia’s (at purchasing-power parity), though still well below that in China’s special administrative regions, Hong Kong and Macau. At the other extreme, the poorest province, Guizhou, has an income per head close to that of India. Note that these figures use the same PPP conversion rate for the whole of China, but prices are likely to be lower in poorer provinces than in richer ones, slightly reducing regional inequality.

A TextMyFood servers’ instruction screen shows pending requests sent via text message from customers.
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January 17, 2011 from WBUR

The menu at Charlie’s Kitchen, a dive bar in Cambridge, Mass., might not stand out for its cutting-edge cuisine. But the eatery is at the forefront when it comes to how customers can communicate with the wait staff.

A sticker on the wall of a corner booth says it all: “Can’t find your server, just text!”

Charlie’s is one of the first restaurants in the country to try TextMyFood, a new service that allows customers to communicate with their server via text messaging.

Five minutes after typing, “I’m at table 3. I want a tossed salad with ranch dressing,” a meal arrives at the table.

Check, Please

“There are pros and cons,” says Kristina Henry, a server at Charlie’s. “It’s great for a night like Friday night when we’re really busy. It’s packed and you’re running around [and] people text like, ‘Can I have my check please?'”

Even though TextMyFood may make her job easier, Henry says she finds the service impersonal.

“As a server, I would rather want to go to the guest and talk to them face to face and ask them what they would like instead of getting it through a computer,” she says.

Still, the technology doesn’t replace the server.

“It’s not eliminating human contact,” says Bob Nilsson, the president of TextMyFood. “There’s always a server at the other end. You just want to have that contact sooner. If you can’t see them and can’t make that contact, rather than waving your arms or getting up, just use the natural communication and let them know what you need.”

Nilsson says the goal of the service is to increase the amount of money customers will spend. For example, guests are more likely to order another round of drinks if they text the request in the moment. If they can’t find the server, they often pass.

But not everyone at Charlie’s Kitchen finds it useful to be able to text requests to their server.

“I guess it seems kind of pointless because I can tell my waitress to her face what I want to drink,” says customer Zach Brickett.

Prank Texts

Another customer, John McSweeney, wonders if people will abuse the system.

“It sort of occurred to me to maybe — just as soon as we ordered our beers — to take out my phone and be like, ‘Beers/stat/now,'” he says.

Prank texting is indeed a problem.

“I’ve gotten, ‘Glasses are sexy.’ I’ve gotten, ‘Two of us need something and three of us need your number,'” says Joshua DeCosta, another server at Charlie’s Kitchen.

In response, some establishments — where there’s a lot of heavy drinking — turn off the service after a certain hour. But other managers say they appreciate the ability to monitor guests.

If too many inappropriate texts come in from one person, it’s time to cut them off.

Time To Tip

It’s not uncommon for restaurant or bar patrons to have to wait to pay even though they have their check in front of them and their credit card out. That’s because servers aren’t always in sight.

Now, instead of waving, a text will do.

A few seconds after typing, “T3. My credit card is waiting,” into my phone, the server comes over to take my payment and smiles.

January 18, 2011

He will disclose the details of ‘massive potential tax evasion’ before he flies home to stand trial over his actions
Rudolf Elmer in Mauritius
Rudolf Elmer in Mauritius: “Well-known pillars of society will hold investment portfolios and may include houses, trading companies, artwork, yachts, jewellery, horses, and so on.” Photograph: Rene Soobaroyen for the Guardian
Ed Vulliamy

The Observer, Sun 16 Jan 2011 00.06 GMT
The offshore bank account details of 2,000 “high net worth individuals” and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland.
British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London. Those involved include, Elmer tells the Observer, “approximately 40 politicians”.
Elmer, who after his press conference will return to Switzerland from exile in Mauritius to face trial, is a former chief operating officer in the Cayman Islands and employee of the powerful Julius Baer bank, which accuses him of stealing the information.
He is also – at a time when the activities of banks are a matter of public concern – one of a small band of employees and executives seeking to blow the whistle on what they see as unprofessional, immoral and even potentially criminal activity by powerful international financial institutions.
Along with the City of London and Wall Street, Switzerland is a fortress of banking and financial services, but famously secretive and expert in the concealment of wealth from all over the world for tax evasion and other extra-legal purposes.
Elmer says he is releasing the information “in order to educate society”. The list includes “high net worth individuals”, multinational conglomerates and financial institutions – hedge funds”. They are said to be “using secrecy as a screen to hide behind in order to avoid paying tax”. They come from the US, Britain, Germany, Austria and Asia – “from all over”.
Clients include “business people, politicians, people who have made their living in the arts and multinational conglomerates – from both sides of the Atlantic”. Elmer says: “Well-known pillars of society will hold investment portfolios and may include houses, trading companies, artwork, yachts, jewellery, horses, and so on.”
“What I am objecting to is not one particular bank, but a system of structures,” he told the Observer. “I have worked for major banks other than Julius Baer, and the one thing on which I am absolutely clear is that the banks know, and the big boys know, that money is being secreted away for tax-evasion purposes, and other things such as money-laundering – although these cases involve tax evasion.”
Elmer was held in custody for 30 days in 2005, and is charged with breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws, forging documents and sending threatening messages to two officials at Julius Baer.
Elmer says: “I agree with privacy in banking for the person in the street, and legitimate activity, but in these instances privacy is being abused so that big people can get big banking organisations to service them. The normal, hard-working taxpayer is being abused also.
“Once you become part of senior management,” he says, “and gain international experience, as I did, then you are part of the inner circle – and things become much clearer. You are part of the plot. You know what the real products and service are, and why they are so expensive. It should be no surprise that the main product is secrecy … Crimes are committed and lies spread in order to protect this secrecy.”
The names on the CDs will not be made public, just as a much shorter list of 15 clients that Elmer handed to WikiLeaks in 2008 has remained hitherto undisclosed by the organisation headed by Julian Assange, currently on bail over alleged sex offences in Sweden, and under investigation in the US for the dissemination of thousands of state department documents.
Elmer has been hounded by the Swiss authorities and media since electing to become a whistleblower, and his health and career have suffered.
“My understanding is that my client’s attempts to get the banks to act over various complaints he made came to nothing internally,” says Elmer’s lawyer, Jack Blum, one of America’s leading experts in tracking offshore money. “Neither would the Swiss courts act on his complaints. That’s why he went to WikiLeaks.”
That first crop of documents was scrutinised by the Guardian newspaper in 2009, which found “details of numerous trusts in which wealthy people have placed capital. This allows them lawfully to avoid paying tax on profits, because legally it belongs to the trust … The trust itself pays no tax, as a Cayman resident”, although “the trustees can distribute money to the trust’s beneficiaries”.
Now, Blum says, “Elmer is being tried for violating Swiss banking secrecy law even though the data is from the Cayman Islands. This is bold extraterritorial nonsense. Swiss secrecy law should apply to Swiss banks in Switzerland, not a Swiss subsidiary in the Cayman Islands.”
Julius Baer has denied all wrongdoing, and rejects Elmer’s allegations. It has said that Elmer “altered” documents in order to “create a distorted fact pattern”.
The bank issued a statement on Friday saying: “The aim of [Elmer’s] activities was, and is, to discredit Julius Baer as well as clients in the eyes of the public. With this goal in mind, Mr Elmer spread baseless accusations and passed on unlawfully acquired, respectively retained, documents to the media, and later also to WikiLeaks. To back up his campaign, he also used falsified documents.”
The bank also accuses Elmer of threatening colleagues

One year after an earthquake devastated Haiti, much of the promised relief and reconstruction aid has not reached those most in need. In fact, the nation’s tragedy has served as an opportunity to further enrich corporate interests.

The details of a recent lawsuit, as reported by Business Week, highlights the ways in which contractors — including some of the same players who profited from Hurricane Katrina-related reconstruction — have continued to use their political connections to gain profits from others’ suffering, receiving contacts worth tens of millions of dollars while the Haitian people receive pennies at best. It also demonstrates ways in which charity and development efforts have mirrored and contributed to corporate abuses.

Lewis Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was named US special coordinator for relief and reconstruction after the earthquake. He worked this job for a few months, then immediately moved to the private sector, where he could sell his contacts and connections to the highest bidder. He quickly got a $30,000-a-month (plus bonuses) contract with the Haiti Recovery Group (HRG).

HRG had been founded by AshBritt, Inc., a Florida-based contractor who had received acres of bad press for their post-Katrina contracting. AshBritt’s partner in HRG is Gilbert Bigio, a wealthy Haitian businessman with close ties to the Israeli military. Bigio made a fortune during the corrupt Duvalier regime and was a supporter of the right-wing coup against Haitian president Aristide.

Although Lucke received $60,000 for two months’ work, he is suing because he says he is owed an additional $500,000 for the more than 20-million dollars in contracts he helped HRG obtain during that time.

As CorpWatch has reported, AshBritt “has enjoyed meteoric growth since it won its first big debris removal subcontract from none other than Halliburton, to help clean up after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.” In 1999, the company also faced allegations of double billing for $765,000 from the Broward County, Florida school board for clean-up done in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma.

AshBritt CEO Randal Perkins is a major donor to Republican causes and hired Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s firm, as well as former US Army Corp of Engineers official Mike Parker, as lobbyists. As a reward for his political connections, AshBritt won 900 million dollars in Post-Katrina contracts, helping them to become the poster child for political corruption in the world of disaster profiteering, even triggering a congressional investigation focusing on their buying of influence. MSNBC reported in early 2006 that criticism of AshBritt “can be heard in virtually every coastal community between Alabama and Texas.”

The contracts given to Bush cronies like AshBritt resulted in local and minority-owned companies losing out on reconstruction work. As Multinational Monitor noted shortly after Katrina, “by turning the contracting process over to prime contractors like AshBritt, the Corps and FEMA have effectively privatized the enforcement of Federal Acquisition Regulations and disaster relief laws such as the Stafford Act, which require contracting officials to prioritize local businesses and give 5 percent of contracts to minority-owned businesses. As a result . . . early reports suggest that over 90 percent of the $2 billion in initial contracts was awarded to companies based outside of the three primary affected states, and that minority businesses received just 1.5 percent of the first $1.6 billion.”

Alex Dupuy, writing in the Washington Post, reported a similar pattern in Haiti, noting that “of the more than 1,500 US contracts doled out worth $267 million, only 20, worth $4.3 million, have gone to Haitian firms. The rest have gone to US firms, which almost exclusively use US suppliers. Although these foreign contractors employ Haitians, mostly on a cash-for-work basis, the bulk of the money and profits are reinvested in the United States.” The same article notes that “less than 10 percent of the $9 billion pledged by foreign donors has been delivered, and not all of that money has been spent. Other than rebuilding the international airport and clearing the principal urban arteries of rubble, no major infrastructure rebuilding — roads, ports, housing, communications — has begun.”

The disaster profiteering exemplified by AshBritt is not just the result of quick decision-making in the midst of a crisis. These contracts are awarded as part of a corporate agenda that sees disaster as an opportunity, a tool for furthering policies that would not be possible in other times. Naomi Klein exposed evidence that, within 24 hours of the earthquake, the influential right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation was already laying plans to use the disaster as an attempt at further privatization of the country’s economy.

Relief and recovery efforts, led by the US military, have also brought a further militarization of relief and criminalization of survivors. Haiti and Katrina also served as staging grounds for increased involvement of mercenaries in reconstruction efforts. As one Blackwater mercenary told Jeremy Scahill when he visited New Orleans in the days after Katrina, “This is a trend. You’re going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations.”

And it’s not just corporations who have been guilty of profiting from Haitian suffering. A recent report from the Disaster Accountability Project (DAP) describes a “significant lack of transparency in the disaster-relief/aid community,” and finds that many relief organizations have left donations for Haiti in their bank accounts, earning interest rather than helping the people of Haiti. DAP director Ben Smilowitz notes that “the fact that nearly half of the donated dollars still sit in the bank accounts of relief and aid groups does not match the urgency of their own fundraising and marketing efforts and donors’ intentions, nor does it covey the urgency of the situation on the ground.”

Haitian poet and human rights lawyer Ezili Dantò has written,

Haiti’s poverty began with a US/Euro trade embargo after its independence, continued with the Independence Debt to France and ecclesiastical and financial colonialism. Moreover, in more recent times, the uses of US foreign aid, as administered through USAID in Haiti, basically serves to fuel conflicts and covertly promote US corporate interests to the detriment of democracy and Haitian health, liberty, sovereignty, social justice and political freedoms. USAID projects have been at the frontlines of orchestrating undemocratic behavior, bringing underdevelopment, coup d’etat, impunity of the Haitian Oligarchy, indefinite incarceration of dissenters, and destroying Haiti’s food sovereignty essentially promoting famine.

Since before the earthquake, Haiti has been a victim of many of those who have claimed they are there to help. Until we address this fundamental issue of corporate profiteering masquerading as aid and development, the nation will remain mired in poverty. And future disasters, wherever they occur, will lead to similar injustices

January 10, 2011

Brazil’s moves last week to stem the rise of its currency reflect the growing anxiety in many emerging economies about inflows of hot money. Fickle deposits in banks – ancient enablers of calamitous booms and busts in credit – deserve even wider attention. It is time to prohibit all banks – and depository institutions like money market funds – from paying more than the risk-free government bill rate. In short, we need to cap rates on all short-term deposits.

This might seem an unthinkable throwback. In the US interest rate ceilings were supposedly consigned to history along with the regulation of trucks and airlines – swept away by innovative money market funds and the deregulatory tide of the late 1970s and 1980s. Banks were forced, says the folklore, to pay market rates to long-exploited depositors, instead of giving away free toasters to attract custom.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Lord Lawson baffled by bank auditors – Jan-04
Clegg warns banks over bonuses – Dec-16
Banks urged to use profits as a buffer – Dec-17
What the Bank says – Dec-17
Financial services’ tax bill tumbles – Dec-16
In depth: UK banks – Nov-09

In fact deregulating rates on deposits was more like eliminating the inspection of truck brakes than freeing truck tariffs. Bankers had long feared that competing for deposits by paying high interest rates triggered races to the bottom in lending, while yield-chasing depositors were seen as a dangerous source of funds. Banks in good condition, the head of the Philadelphia National Bank said in 1884, did not pay interest to depositors.

Bidding for the deposits of banks with surplus funds was particularly problematic. The rules allowed anyone to start a bank in the US, but made it impossible to open many deposit taking branches. Urban banks, particularly those with Wall Street connections, competed with each other for the surplus funds of country banks. There was a nasty downside: unexpected withdrawals by country banks triggered panics. Yet exhortations by regulators and bankers’ associations to limit interest on interbank deposits were futile.

The 1933 Glass-Steagall act finally banned all payments on demand deposits by most American banks to “forestall ruinous competition”. In conjunction with tough controls on banks’ assets, rate limits worked wonders. Despite reputations for indolence, banks raised their lending by over 9 per cent a year in the 1950s and 1960s. The largest number of banks that failed in any year was just seven.

The Federal Reserve’s inability to control inflation in the 1970s, however, ultimately made deposit rate rules untenable. Banks only able to offer non-interest paying deposits, whose real value declined by the day, lost customers to money market funds that contained riskless but interest bearing T-bills. Later banks joined with their money market competitors to create a vast uninsured and unregulated funding system that fuelled an explosion of dodgy lending and made banks vulnerable to the sort of panicky withdrawals that the 1933 rules ought to have ended.

The story of US deposit regulation offers important lessons for bank regulators: pay attention to short-term liabilities – just focusing on bank assets to control contagious imprudence is unwise. Moreover controls (and explicit guarantees) have to be comprehensive and uniform: they cannot exclude the deposits of sophisticated investors or exempt intermediaries such as money market funds. Allowing large depositors to earn higher rates (under the fiction that they face more risk) is particularly dangerous when the mad music to which bankers dance heats up.

Sceptics may point to the problem Spanish banks faced last year when interbank lending markets seized up: If they had not been able to raise rates, banks might have had to take more emergency funding from the state. In fact, it was hot short-term deposits that put the banks on the brink in the first place. Comprehensive rate caps (and deposit insurance) would have made it difficult for banks to expand recklessly their lending – and protected them from a run by depositors.

Limiting rates paid to depositors also does not necessarily bestow windfall profits to banks. Rate caps have their most bite during boom times when they curb the volume of loans. Provided regulators do not allow banks to crank up their credit risks, profit margins on loans are restrained along with their volumes. Note that the deregulation that was supposed to put competitive pressure on bank profits in fact showered unimaginable wealth on bankers.

The writer is a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and author of ‘A Call for Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy’

PHOENIX — An array of federal and state investigations into the way banks foreclose on delinquent homeowners has contributed to a sharp slowdown in foreclosures across the country, especially in hard-hit cities like this one.
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Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Over the last several months, some banks have been reluctant to seize homes from distressed borrowers, economists and government officials say, as they face scrutiny from regulators and the prospect of sanctions when investigations wrap up in the coming weeks and months.

The Obama administration, in its most recent housing report, said foreclosure activity fell 21 percent in November from October, the biggest monthly decline in five years. Here in Phoenix, foreclosures fell by more than a third in the same period, reflected in the severe drop in foreclosed homes being auctioned on the courthouse plaza.

“There’s no product, just nothing to buy,” complained Sean Waak, an agent for investors, during a recent auction.

The pace of foreclosures could be curtailed further by courts. In a closely watched case, the highest court in Massachusetts invalidated two foreclosures in that state on Friday. The court ruled that two banks, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo, failed to prove they owned the mortgages when they foreclosed on the homes.

If the slowdown continued through this month and into the spring, it could be a boost for the economy. Reducing foreclosures in a meaningful way would act to stabilize the housing market, real estate experts say, letting the administration patch up one of the economy’s most persistently troubled sectors. Fewer foreclosures means that buyers pay more for the ones that do come to market, which strengthens overall home prices and builds consumer confidence in housing.

“Anything that buys time, that reduces the supply of houses coming onto the market, is helpful,” said Karl Guntermann, a professor of real estate finance at Arizona State University.

It is not that borrowers have stopped defaulting on their mortgages. They are missing payments as frequently as ever, data shows. But the lenders are not beginning formal foreclosure proceedings or, when they are, do not complete them with an auction sale. And in the most favorable outcome for distressed borrowers, some lenders are modifying loans so foreclosure becomes unnecessary.

The drop in foreclosures began in late September when some lenders were revealed to have been using so-called robo-signers to process thousands of foreclosures without verifying the accuracy of the data. As the investigations into the problems proceeded, the uncertainty caused many lenders to become more cautious.

Their foreclosure procedures, the banks have repeatedly said, are sound. But preliminary results of several of the investigations have indicated substantial problems. Coordinating many of the inquiries is the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, established by President Obama.

“The administration is committed to taking appropriate action on these issues where wrongdoing has occurred,” said Melanie Roussell, an administration spokeswoman.

The diminished supply of foreclosed homes has already had an effect on prices at the auctions on the courthouse plaza here, bidders said.

Houses change hands on the plaza with a minimum of ceremony. Three sets of trustees hired by the banks sit a few feet apart, their backs to a statue of a naked family looking for all the world as if its members had just been cast out of their home. The trustees call off properties in a monotone to bidders clustered around them. Winners must immediately hand over a $10,000 deposit in the form of a cashier’s check.

On a recent afternoon, one bidder, Pam Mullavey of Infoclosure, found herself in a bidding war with Chris Romuzga of Posted Properties for a 2001 house that had fetched $644,000 at the very peak of the boom.

This time around, the bank set the floor at $271,000. Ms. Mullavey and Mr. Romuzga rapidly pushed up the price in varying increments of $100 and $500. Mr. Romuzga’s client had planned to pull out at $307,000 but asked him to keep bidding as Ms. Mullavey sailed on. Her winning bid was $310,100, well above what a similar house might have fetched just a few months ago.

“Sometimes I wonder why people are bidding so much,” Ms. Mullavey said.

For Mr. Romuzga, it was the fourth time that afternoon he had been outbid. Only once had he secured a property.

The investors’ frustration could be a good thing for Phoenix homeowners, who have seen values fall 54.5 percent since 2006. In the last few months, home prices have started to drop again. A decline in foreclosures, economists say, could break the fall.

Cameron Findlay, chief economist with the mortgage company LendingTree, said that the shifting behavior of lenders had helped change perceptions about the foreclosed.

“Initially, society’s view was to run them out of the house,” he said.

That resulted in vacant and dilapidated homes, which blighted neighborhoods and drove potential buyers away.

“People should be hopeful the modification programs work — for their own benefit,” said Mr. Findlay.

More than four million households are in serious default and vulnerable to losing their homes. Lenders maintain that cases of borrowers improperly foreclosed are extremely rare.